CAMPBELLTON, New Brunswick, May 31, 2023 – I read the Bible cover-to-cover several times a year. I don’t stop after each word and mull it over, but I do get a good overview of the history of God’s people across the millennia. What I see is the same thing happening over and over again – God setting limits to people’s behavior through a covenant, people promising to abide by the covenant, the promise slowly being bent and then broken, God giving his people time to repent and turn back, God finally running out of patience, followed by a major upheaval… and then God setting a new covenant, his people promising to abide by the new covenant, the slow bending and breaking of the new covenant, and so on, and so on, and so on.

And yet despite the obvious cyclical nature of this process, most people haven’t learned from the mistakes of those who came before them because they keep making the same mistakes themselves.

It’s disheartening to read how easily people fall back into sin after promising God they won’t. It’s especially disheartening to read how people turn their back on God after they’ve heard (and to all appearances received) the Gospel.

Scripture says we’ll all be tried and tempted. I’m an expert at being tried and tempted, not to mention a poster child occasionally for what NOT to do when tried and tempted. Yet the whole purpose in God permitting us to make mistakes is that we learn from them so that we don’t make those same mistakes again. Jesus was very clear in his warnings to the people he’d helped not to sin again or they’d find themselves in a worse state. He said, and I quote: “Go, and do not sin again.”

Ideally, we’d learn not only from our own mistakes but from each other’s mistakes as cautionary tales, so that we don’t make the same mistakes ourselves and go through the same suffering. Yes, ideally, we’d learn from each other’s mistakes, but this rarely happens. I guess maybe we learn best by personally suffering consequences, but just how many mistakes can we make before God’s patience runs out?

For some sins, we only get one chance. If we do the same thing again, after being explicitly warned not to do it, we may not get a second chance. It might be our spiritual undoing.

There is no judgement in this piece. I am not judging, simply pointing out that sin leads unavoidably to spiritual pain. The problem with spiritual pain is that most people when they feel it run to other people for help rather than to God. They hide from God, like Adam and Eve hid from God in the Garden of Eden after they’d eaten the forbidden fruit and suddenly realized they were naked.

Whole denominations with creeds that deviate from the Commandments exist solely because people are hiding from God. But if you hide from God and refuse to repent, God has no option but to turn the spiritual thumbscrews on you. When he does that, the pain is immense.

(And yes, I do speak from personal experience.)

Many people in the Bible were forced into similar situations when God had to resort to the spiritual thumbscrew option. The wise ones responded by immediately repenting in sackcloth and ashes but the foolish ones doubled down on their sin, continuing to refuse to repent. It’s all laid out there for us in the Bible, the right way and the wrong way to respond to God’s corrections. All God asks of us is to pick up the Good Book and read it and heed it.

Read it and heed it. That’s all he asks.

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Every time I read through the Bible, I get more and more frustrated with the people who didn’t heed it, and I’m not talking about the “heathens” here – I’m talking about God’s people who had full knowledge of God’s Laws and instructions, who willingly bound themselves to God’s covenants and then turned around and broke them. I get frustrated to the point where I don’t even want to read those passages any more, so I skip over them. I don’t want to read and reread what most of the kings after David did, the ones who purposely did evil in the sight of the Lord. So I skim through the kings until I get to the ones who did “that which was right in the sight of the Lord” and I read about them instead.

Jesus expressed the same frustration with the educated temple elite. They knew all of God’s Laws and had for the most part memorized the prophets, and yet there they were, raining all over Jesus’ parade and acting worse than the worst of the heathens. Recall that it wasn’t the heathen Romans who were agitating for Jesus’ execution (Pontius Pilate wanted to let him go); it was the temple elders who demanded that Jesus be crucified.

And so, it seems, we have two types of people who defy God – the ones who are ignorant of him (the so-called heathens) and the ones who think they know better than him and proudly refuse to repent, even when God applies the thumbscrews. The heathens we can get to with our prayers, but the proud (or what God in scripture calls the “stiff-necked” and “hard-hearted”) will have to suffer and suffer hard, like King Manasseh or like yours truly. The stiff-necked and hard-hearted need to be thoroughly broken before they can turn, if they ever do.

I know God doesn’t want me to be disheartened by the cycle of sin that repeats over and over in the Bible or by the record of those who fell and didn’t get back up. I know that every time I open the Good Book he wants me to learn from it so that I don’t fall into the same traps as other people, so that I’m encouraged and comforted by those who got it wrong at first but who eventually learned the right way, so that I’m encouraged and comforted by his kept promises.

The Bible is not meant to discourage and dishearten us – far from it. If it were meant to discourage and dishearten us, it would be promoted 24/7 by the mainstream media, and that clearly isn’t happening. Part of the reason why I keep this blog is to show what being a born-again believer looks like in real life. I’m not perfect, but that doesn’t stop me from aiming for perfection. I make mistakes every day and occasionally I make whoppers, but THANK GOD I crawl back to God and make amends as he sees fit. If it’s the thumbscrews, it’s the thumbscrews. Even Jesus’ closest disciples had to go through those occasionally.

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I hope that you pick up the Bible every day and read it. I hope that you learn from it and that if God’s Spirit convicts you in some way while you’re reading it, you accept the conviction and not hide from God. (You can’t hide from God anyway, so you might as well not even try.) I hope that you’re encouraged by God’s Word and fed by it so that it becomes part of you now and for all eternity, because all things that are good come from God and stay with you forever. Those are the treasures you take to Heaven; the rest you leave behind.

I hope that when God opens the Book of Life at the Judgment and reads from it, you’re in it. I hope that far from being a cautionary tale, you shine brightly like all of God’s saints, and while not perfect on Earth, you finally achieve perfection in Heaven. And I hope that when we both settle into our respective places in Heaven (if we both make it), we’ll visit each other. I know we’ll have a lot to talk about and a lot to laugh about, too. We won’t remember our mistakes that we made on Earth, but we will remember the good times – the godly times – and we’ll remember everything we’ve done and said in Heaven up to that point.

And we won’t have any more cautionary tales to share with each other ever again, just treasures.